Books by Lasky a treat for young adult readers

ALICE ROSE & SAM, by Kathryn Lasky, Hyperion Books for Children, New York, 1998, 252 pages, hardcover, $15.95.

PRESENTING KATHRYN LASKY by Joanne Brown, 1998, Twayne Publishers, New York, 172 pages, hardcover, $28.

I finally have a treat for our young adult readers — a Kathryn Lasky double celebration. Lasky has penned a real page turner of a mystery — “Alice Rose & Sam” — set in the West during the Civil War era. Lasky also is the subject of an excellent biography — Joanne Brown’s “Presenting Kathryn Lasky” — which I would also highly recommend to parents, teachers, aspiring writers, and Lasky fans.

As “Alice Rose & Sam” opens, its protagonist, Alice Rose, is watching her mother and baby sister being buried. When her father, a journalist with a penchant for following silver and gold strikes, is not up to the task, she piles heavy rocks on top of their graves to protect the bodies from coyotes.

This opening sets the tone for the book. Despising Virginia City, Alice Rose longs to live in civilized Boston. Even in the book’s more humorous moments she protests that the mining town is no place for a child. But with great fortitude and resourcefulness she proves herself capable of surviving in and even triumphing over her unforgiving environment.

As Alice Rose walks into town she sees a murder about to happen. Despite appearances she is sure it is not a simple case of a drunk being shot for cheating at cards. “There were cold-eyed killers in Virginia City, men hired to kill — nothing personal, mind you. … Their eyes were not just cold, they were dead.”

Even though the murder victim, Mutch, manages in his last moments of life to tell Alice Rose that he was killed for running off with a preacher’s wife, she is sure something more sinister is afoot. The murderer is far too good at his grim task to be a cheated-on clergyman. And Alice Rose is determined to solve the mystery. Ironically, she discovers her most significant clues to the much larger picture through a Bible class. Getting too close to the truth, she is thrown down an abandoned mine shaft and left for dead. And if you can put the book down at this point you have much better willpower than I do.

Although Mark Twain did not actually participate in this adventure, Alice Rose’s fellow detective is based on him. The real Twain was in Virginia City at the time of this novel. As we learn in Lasky’s biography, her admiration for Twain was the inspiration for “Alice Rose & Sam.” As a child, Lasky built rafts and pretended a pond was the Mississippi River. As an adult she identified with Mark Twain, creating Alice Rose to be his fictional friend. “What most appealed to me about Mark Twain was that he was a person who had learned all the really important things about life and people in spite of school and in spite of church or organized religion.”

I would highly recommend “Alice Rose & Sam” with one caveat: it is not for more sensitive children. As we learn in Lasky’s biography, like her hero, Mark Twain, who created some situations and characters a bit too risque for the Victorian world, she has been criticized in her choices of characters, settings, and actions.

Despising a sanitized version of the past, Laksy defends the inclusion of a prostitute in another historical novel, “The Bone Wars”: “A preponderance of the women who went West alone were or became prostitutes. Despite that, we prefer to think of them as school marms. Well guess what? There weren’t all that many schools out there, and, brace yourself, I discovered the existence of more than a few schoolmarms/prostitutes.”

Lasky is a consummate researcher. “Alice Rose & Sam” is rich in the details that vividly establish time and place. Yet it is not overburdened with detail to the point of detracting from the plot — a criticism that has been made of some of her other novels.

Those are my picks for sizzling summer reading. What a fun way to learn about an intriguing period in our nation’s history, one of the most influential authors of the 19th century, and the writer who brought both to life in a spellbinding mystery.